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Mozilla: Tabs on top for Mac in Firefox 4 beta 2

Following their recent Firefox planning meeting, the Mozilla developers have confirmed that the next beta for Firefox 4, scheduled to arrive next week, will include the new default 'tabs on top' layout – similar to the tabs position in the Chrome and Opera web browsers – for Mac OS X systems. The new layout was initially introduced in the first Firefox 4 beta earlier this month, but only for Windows-based systems.

Another planned change for the next beta of Firefox 4, for example, is support for CSS transitions, a new Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology feature that provides a way to animate changes as opposed to having the changes take effect instantly. Mozilla says that Linux users will receive the new tabs on top layout in a future update "when the theme has been modified to support the change".

Firefox 4 is based on version 2.0 of the Gecko rendering platform – the Firefox 3.6 branch uses Gecko 1.9.2 – and features a new Add-ons Manager and extension management API, and a number of, currently Windows-only, improvements, such as a new Firefox Button on Vista and Windows 7 systems that replaces the menu bar. According to Firefox development director Mike Beltzner, the developers plan to release a new beta version "every two to three weeks". A first release candidate (RC) for Firefox 4 is currently scheduled to arrive in October of this year. A final release date, however, has yet to be confirmed.